One-day exhibition opening and site-specific meeting
UN-WAR SPACE
Architect Armina Pilav in collaboration with artist Servet Cihangiroğlu
Saturday, 5.10. 2019
21:00
Meeting Point: in front of Dom Kulture
The exhibition is organized by the Unseen Festival
We will be walking with Armin Pilav, architect and researcher, and Servet Cihangiroğlu, an intermedia artist living on the Sirnak – Paris route.
In addition to presenting their work on Un-war space, Armina and Servet will create a site-specific encounter that proposes the processes of transformation of violence that is still present in our region, in the form of spatial and social trauma, which began in the war of the 1990s. This process involves the premises of the city of Cavtat, citizens as well as everyone present at the Unseen festival.
Armina Pilav in her pluriannual research Un-war Space, on the entanglements of war and un-war spaces, refuses to give a single idea on the «destructive metamorphosis» (Zoran Doršner, 1994) of the city of Sarajevo, that was once under siege. She instead gives us a performing archive in a form of compressed, specially designed, exhibition device through which we can now, more than twenty years later, in the «age defined by planetary civil war» (Hito Steyerl, 2017), mass migrations and growing inequalities, see, read or speak about the war in Sarajevo. The device acts as a thinking-in-progress machine, that bears witness how citizens, through spatial (re)actions and (re)usage of available architectural and non-architectural materials, were undoing the war in Sarajevo. The archive contains numerous video and sound documentation, photos, architectural drawings and the Un-war Lexicon, but it is purposely left unfinished, so it can receive ever new testimonies, and politically position the necessity of collective (re)thinking of the war in Sarajevo, or any other violent conflict in the world.
The Un-war Space installation is a collective art work by Ana Dana Beroš, Rafaela Dražić, Miodrag Gladović, Matija Kralj and Mauro Sirotnjak conducted by the architect and researcher Armina Pilav. Un-war Space exhibition device is also part of an on-line open source archive entitled Un-war Space accessible on the link: http://unwarspace.bk.tudelft.nl/
The Un-war Space installation is joined on this occasion by a video work by artist Servet Cihangiroğlu titled ‘immigration / immigration’ (2016), who, through his personal experience as well as his mother’s experience, questions the ongoing state of war in Turkish territory.
Armina Pilav is an architect, researcher and lecturer at the University of Sheffield, Landscape Department. She received the Marie Curie Individual Fellowship for her Un-war Space research. Armina publishes in magazines and academic journals on topics of space, body and politics. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennials of Architecture (2014, 2018).
Servet Cihangiroğlu was born in 1985 in Şırnak, the town located in Eastern Anatolia. He completed primary, secondary and high school education in Şırnak. In 2014, Servet graduated at the Institute of Fine Arts, Sculpture Department at Hacettepe University of Ankara. His work focuses on ephemeral documenting of the contemporary condition of the wars in Turkey while exploring his own experience and living in the complex and conflictual environments. Servet in his work uses multiple interactions of his body and others body, different physical materials through performative relationships, photography, video, urban and domestic spaces. He exhibited in many groups’ exhibitions, festivals and private collections. Servet also participates in art residencies, pedagogical projects crossing artistic and cultural fields that worked with different age groups. Currently, he lives in Paris as artist in residency hosted by the I-team learning lab organized by Relais Culture Europe from Paris.